I Beseech You From Beyond the Grave: Denuclearize!

Is North Korea about to summon the spirit of dictators past to break the deadlock over nuclear negotiations?

Under apparent heavy pressure from China to get dialogue moving, North Korea’s dispatch of top diplomat Kim Kye Gwan to Beijing for talks on Wednesday generated speculation that Pyongyang might have something new to offer to kick-start meetings with the U.S. and others.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Kim Il Sung at his 80th birthday in 1992, a couple of years before his dying wish to denuclearize the Korean peninsula

Based on official accounts of the meeting, that wasn’t the case. According to China’s Foreign Ministry, Mr. Kim said: “North Korea is willing to have dialogue with all sides and attend any kind of meeting, including six-party talks, and hopes to peacefully resolve the nuclear issue via negotiation.”

Here’s the relevant part of Xinhua’s readout of that meeting: “The DPRK is ready to work with parties concerned to properly solve relevant issues through multiform dialogue and consultation, including the six-party talks, said Choe.”

The catch, of course, is that while North Korea says it’s ready for talks, it wants to be treated as a nuclear-weapons state in any negotiations. Nuclear weapons are its “treasured sword” to defend the nation, it says. Negotiations on reducing nukes are fine—but not only about our nukes, it argues.

The U.S., South Korea and Japan aren’t buying that approach, and in a meeting in Washington on Wednesday of their top diplomats tasked with handling North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, they reiterated their call for North Korea first to honor prior commitments to begin rolling back its nuclear program.

So what gives? Are we in permanent deadlock, or is one side prepared to make a concession to bring everyone back to the negotiating table?

One possibility (of course speculative—this is North Korea, after all) is that the North has given itself an opt-out with the help of Kim Jong Un’s father and grandfather.

The statement from China’s Foreign Ministry late Wednesday also said that Kim Kye Gwan said that “the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula was the dying wish of Chairman Kim Il Sung and General Secretary Kim Jong Il.”

That might have been thrown in just to impress the Chinese side, but it also could be used as a justification for the North to change course in a seemingly magnanimous move to ratchet back its nuclear activity. In North Korea the wishes of the Kim family trump all other considerations, so it’s possible they could be cover for a major policy change if the North is serious about getting talks going again.

That offer “begins to lay the foundations for a North Korean climb down from its assertion of nuclear status through its statement that ‘the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is the behest of our leader and our general and the policy task that must be carried out by our party, state, and millions of soldiers and people without fail,’” he wrote in a recent blog post.